Dai Gyakuten Saiban 2: latest batch of screens, developers interview

This week, Dai Gyakuten Saiban 2: Naruhodou Ryuunosuke no Kakugo is featured in Famitsu magazine, with some more details about the game, but also Part 1 of a large interview with the developers.

Let’s start with the details: there isn’t that many of them, actually… A new character is introduced, a mysterious masked man called the “Masked Disciple”. He’s a compatriot of Prosecutor Barok van Zieks, and at one point in the story, the pair ends up attacked by a mysterious group. For some reason, the Masked Man knows nothing about his past, and has even forgotten his very name. Nobody has ever seen his face either.

Here’s the latest batch of screenshots and artworks:

Next, various tidbits from the first page of a large interview with the developers: Shu Takumi (Director), Kazuya Nuri (Art Director), and Motohide Eshiro (Producer).

If you read our previous reports about Dai Gyakuten Saiban 2: Naruhodou Ryuunosuke no Kakugo, you know that the World’s Fair is one of the central elements of the story. In this interview, it’s revealed that Kazuya Nuri was the one who came up with that theme, since he was tired of always drawing small locked rooms as murder scenes.

As for Thomas Romain (who also worked on Dai Gyakuten Saiban: Naruhodou Ryuunosuke no Bouken), he was tasked with designing several parts of the World’s Fair, since he has experience with mecha designs. He also helped with the design of various areas in London, since he’s from Europe (he’s French, actually).

For this game, Shu Takumi didn’t want to write cases that simply took place in 19th-century London, he wanted cases that could only take place at that time.

The general plot for the series was outlined when he was working on Dai Gyakuten Saiban: Naruhodou Ryuunosuke no Bouken, but writing for the sequel still took longer than expected. In fact, he was planning to finish the scenario before development began in earnest, but he wasn’t able to.

Shu Takumi had a goal: make a game that not only felt distinct from the original Ace Attorney series, but also lived up to it. He often discussed the scenario with the development team, asking them for guesses on where the story would wind up. He then challenged himself to try and make the plot even better than they were expecting.

Kazuma Asougi is pretty popular among players, and the team was a bit surprised by that. In this sequel, they feel that the various main characters get a more even amount of spotlight and character development.

Later in the interview, Shu Takumi reveals that he quite enjoys the Sherlock Holmes stories by Robert L. Fish, as they show him being a bit non-sensical. He’s also quite fond of the first series of stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Despite the Dai Gyakuten Saiban taking place in London, Shu Takumi has never been there personally (he did ask for him and the team to go there for research purposes). Kazuya Nuri actually went there as a student, while Motohide Eshiro had to go on several occasions when working on DmC: Devil May Cry.

For the full translation of the interview, you can head over to Ash’s website!

Dai Gyakuten Saiban 2: Naruhodou Ryuunosuke no Kakugo (DS) comes out on August 3rd in Japan.